We've relied on asset bubbles in stocks and home equity and the endless availability of credit to pay our ballooning health care bills and fuel our conspicuous consumption. We are living beyond our means. A reckoning is inevitable.

It's like this.

If you borrow a million dollars and spend it, it doesn't make you rich. It just makes it look that way. Since there's no way you could ever repay that million dollars, you're actually bankrupt. It'll just take a while for everybody to figure that out.

In the meantime, enjoy your wealth.

This is how opaque financial derivatives work. And it works so well, we have literally hundreds of trillions of dollars of them. It's all debt that can never be repaid, but it'll take a while for everybody to figure that out.

In the meantime, they enjoy their wealth.

It gets worse the more you look at it.

When Glenn posted his comment above to LWM saying that he (Glenn)had never seen so many non sequiturs in a thread, I considered posting the observation that if he's going to discourage non sequiturs, he could lose a quarter of his readers, and that if he were to seriously discourage the argumentum ad hominem, he could lose another 50%.

This is nothing compared to the old NYT forums, where it was common to get 2000 posts in a day on a single thread, half of it trash talk. Those threads would run for weeks and months and commonly run to more than 100,000 posts.

By comparison, these Salon boards are tame in the extreme. Nobody has described Joan Walsh in the most explicitly pornographic terms available, like the wingnuts did for Maureen Dowd. Nobody has threatened to exterminate congress if they try to impeach Bush, or described how some librul is to be assassinated. And I haven't received a single death threat.

They're thinking it, though. Of that you can be quite certain.

I CHALLENGE ANYONE to name ONE CONSTRUCTIVE OR POSITIVE THING THAT THIS ADMINISTRATION HAS DONE.

JUST ONE.

YOU CANNOT DO IT. THEY HAVE DONE NOT ONE THING GOOD. NOT ONE.

They've managed to partially discredit rabid megalomaniac right-wing imperialistic warmongering fascism.

At least with a few people.

None of whom matter.

RE: http://www.warisaracket.org/

Presumably that general was referring to the war against Japan and the Nazis. What a 'racket' they were.

You obviously didn't read it. Maybe you should.

It paints a highly accurate and well-corroborated picture of corporatist imperial coercion, conquest, and mass murder by one of its major military actors.

Many such pictures have been painted over the years.

Fascism in Amerika has deep roots, going back all the way to McKinley. Except that now we call it 'neoconservatism'.

And corporations are persons under the Constitution.

Really? Where does the Constitution grant personhood to corporations? Show me. You can't do it. The Constitution does no such thing.

Corporations are not persons and possess only those privileges granted them by charter. Corporations have no rights, which are inherent, and not granted.

No US judicial case ever 'granted' corporations personhood. That's a fiction promoted by corporate lawyers since the 14th amendment came out after the Civil War to enable a means of influencing the legal system that regulates corporations.

That influence has now been extended to actual control, and has been extended to far - even to the 'right' to lie and the 'right' to own forms of life - that the US has devolved into corporatism, now that corporations can write 'laws' supplanting the very system of government which enabled their creation.

Corporatism has been foreseen since the inception of the US as the greatest single threat to the US itself:

Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains. I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

- Thomas Jefferson

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

-- U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864

(letter to Col. William F. Elkins)

Ref: The Lincoln Encyclopedia, Archer H. Shaw (Macmillan, 1950, NY)

Just because corporations still allow you meaningless elections does not mean the US is a 'democracy'. Which it isn't. The country isn't operated for the benefit of its citizens. It's operated for the benefit of well-connected corporations, and those are neither citizens nor persons, no matter what fictions they've persuaded you to buy into.